A Statuette for “Margaret”?

Kudos to Jaime Christley, who, responding to critics’ rumblings of frustration in the Twitterverse and doubtless elsewhere, has posted a petition at Change.org to the distributor Fox Searchlight to

request that film critics and other pertinent voting bodies be given the opportunity to view MARGARET prior to voting in applicable awards, or compiling applicable year-end “best of” lists.

He’s right that the movie, in its brief run in New York and a dozen other cities, received the sort of enthusiastic reviews (including from me, in the magazine and on this blog) that suggests it might well contend (as it deserves to do) for awards from critics’ groups. To the best of my knowledge, neither subsequent screenings of the film nor DVD screeners have been made available to critics; I don’t understand the distributor’s apparent abandonment of the film, which, I think, is one of the year’s best. Without Fox Searchlight’s support, it runs the risk of falling into undeserved oblivion—albeit only temporarily. Because even if “Margaret” doesn’t win any awards, it will be remembered, years and decades hence, as one of the year’s, even the decade’s, cinematic wonders, and will leave historians to ponder and rue its lack of recognition in its own day. It isn’t the film itself that would suffer the short-term consequences (films, after all, don’t suffer)—it would be the film’s director and writer, Kenneth Lonergan, who ought to have the chance to make more films, and soon; it doesn’t take a big-time pundit to know that there’s a connection between awards and commercial success, and between commercial success and the pursuit of a career.

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